Fly Your Business to The Clouds

30 Jul 2018

It was only three years ago when people were still skeptical about how the cloud would come into life or what use it may be. As time goes by, clouds become something that we can count on. Now, there is only a little number of businesses, companies, and organizations which are not using or in the cloud.

Cloud computing is the delivery of on-demand computing services from applications to storage and processing power, typically over the internet and on a pay-as-you-go basis. Basically, cloud computing is the way of keeping information.

In traditional computing, we store all data and programs on our PCs and normally we can access them only through the same computer unless you allow remote access. In cloud computing, all necessary data and programs are stored in the service provider’s information center and thereof they can be accessed from any PC with an internet connection.

Business life, surely, will be even more interesting. The cloud enables companies to consume a compute resource, such as a virtual machine (VM), storage or an application. Yes, rather than owning their own computing infrastructure or in-house data centers, companies can rent access to anything from applications to storage from a cloud service provider.

One benefit of using cloud computing services is that firms can avoid the upfront cost and complexity of owning and maintaining their own IT infrastructure, and instead simply pay for what they use when they use it. In turn, providers of cloud computing services can benefit from significant economies of scale by delivering the same services to a wide range of customers.

Nowadays, business owners are slowly realizing the importance and need of the cloud for their businesses. Not only as a place to store data and important information, but also to access applications in their shared network.

High street bank RBS, for example, developed an artificially intelligent chatbot to reduce the load on live agents and soon found that computing-intensive workloads such as AI are best suited to the public cloud. Its use of cloud and cognitive technologies provided the speed and agility required to develop the chatbot in just over two months.

“Typically, we are seeing 30 to 40 percent of a business’s workloads on the public cloud, but this is on the rise with the growth of cloud-native applications, which are most tightly associated with digital transformation,” says Andrew Wilcock, UK vice president of cloud at IBM. “Clients are shifting to these applications and harnessing the capabilities available on the public cloud, surrounded by agile methodologies that fuel the customer experience.

Highest Level of Disruption Still Evolving

Cloud computing has evolved to become a natural part of how any business thinks. Previously it was sufficient to think of cloud technology as just an element of IT, but now it’s a priority and supports nearly every aspect of a business.

A report by analyst firm Gartner says cloud computing is approaching the highest level on its disruption scale and will act as a necessary enabler for future disruptions. It projects the worldwide public-cloud service market grew to $246.8 billion last year.

The cloud is still currently evolving, so should strategies of enterprises. Here are six ways on how cloud computing will evolve this year:

Multi-Cloud Strategies

Multi-cloud strategy is basically the use of more than one cloud computing services. It can also generally refer to a mix of public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environments. Multi-cloud strategy prevents loss of data and downtime, as well as the ability to avoid vendor lock-in concerns.

It is also largely driven by enterprises’ broader business and technical goals for their betterment in the future, taking advantage of the speed, capacity or features offered by a certain cloud provider. Some may even use multi-cloud for data sovereignty reasons. All in all, multi-cloud strategy gives the ability to find the optimal cloud service for a business and technical need.

Industry-Specific Clouds

The purpose of having industry-specific clouds are very simple, to cater to the unique needs, capability requirements and specific regulations of different industrial sectors. Now, the cloud is not only for businesses. Life sciences, legal practice, government, healthcare, financial services and insurance are now using industry-specific clouds.

Move to Private Cloud

A private cloud is only for a specified client, to which they can operate it involving a distinct and secure cloud-based environment. Only a single entity such as organization, company or yourself, can access and operate with greater control of private clouds ensuring privacy with it. They are higher in security and privacy, giving more control, improved reliability, thus proving also to be a cost and energy efficient strategy for companies big and small.

Invisible Infrastructure

Another evolution of cloud computing is by invisible infrastructure. Yes, it’s a thing nowadays because some organizations are looking for or gravitating towards hidden or invisible infrastructures. This is all because they want seamless integration of cloud, on-premises and hybrid infrastructure, which allows the users to go on with their business operations with no regard of application location.

Diversified IT Environments

When IT environments first started or broke into the mainstream, their structure was just standard and not needing many requirements compared to today. Now, developers are more and more leaning towards using diverse types of IT environments as the cloud continues to expand in the cyber world.

Diversified IT environments are helping solve individual business limitations and give the flexibility to use the best tools and infrastructure that an enterprise needs. This is an answer to the increasing need for cloud storages because of enterprises and organizations migrating more workloads to the cloud to achieve greater production and uptime.

Hybrid Cloud

What do you get when you combine on-premises private cloud and third-party public cloud services? Yes, it’s hybrid cloud. It orchestrates the two platforms, allowing various workloads being worked on between private and public clouds. This kind of strategy not only helps businesses be flexible financially but also opens more data deployment options and very valuable for big data processing, getting most out of the containers.